With Apple’s mobile wallet no longer limited to American Express, this is now Canada’s time to demonstrate our vast contactless payment infrastructure.

Greg Weed, director of card performance research from consulting and research firm Phoenix International, told the Toronto Star Touch “Canada is attractive for Apple Pay,” adding “It’s small but important for Apple in terms of showing how to build usage.”

Canada’s advantage, says Weed, is our vast network of terminals that accept pin-and-chip cards plus NFC for contactless payments, including Apple Pay, compared to the U.S.

Moneris, Canada’s largest credit and debit card processor, notes 85 per cent of their terminals are Apple Pay ready, with over 66 per cent of those merchants already processing contactless payments, saying “consumer adoption of Apple Pay is expected to increase significantly,” with this network in place.

Yeah, makes sense for restaurants to disable tap for that reason. But there are stores around here that take Amex, but have tap disabled. So puzzling. Don’t these stores know tap can make their lines move faster?

It depends on their terminal. Some of the restaurant’s that I’ve been to have the new TD terminals (the ones that talk to you in the creepy voice “Please insert your card”) that prompt for tip amount before card inserttap.

Yeah, I did know it’s off by default, which is silly enough I was being mostly facetious about them charging extra, but I’ve known several merchants over the years that have been frustrated by the higher transaction fees from Amex, and there was some nickel-and-diming involved in a lot of areas. Mind you, that was years ago, so things may have changed.

However, in all seriousness, if Amex isn’t enforcing limits for tap-to-pay, I actually could see them charging higher transaction fees due to the higher risk of fraud, which is a common practice among all card providers. If the transaction fees are higher, that would explain why merchants wouldn’t want it enabled. This is entirely speculation on my part, of course.